Constant Battles: The Myth of the Peaceful, Noble Savage

By Steven A. LeBlanc and Katherine E. Register

With armed conflict in the Persian Gulf now upon us, Harvard archaeologist Steven LeBlanc takes a long-term view of the nature and roots of war, presenting a controversial thesis: The notion of the "noble savage" living in peace with one another and in harmony with nature is a fantasy. In Constant Battles: The Myth of the Peaceful, Noble Savage, LeBlanc contends that warfare and violent conflict have existed throughout human history, and that humans have never lived in ecological balance with nature.

The start of the second major U.S. military action in the Persian Gulf, combined with regular headlines about spiraling environmental destruction, would tempt anyone to conclude that humankind is fast approaching a catastrophic end. But as LeBlanc brilliantly argues, the archaeological record shows that the warfare and ecological destruction we find today fit into patterns of human behavior that have gone on for millions of years.

Constant Battles surveys human history in terms of social organization-from hunter gatherers, to tribal agriculturalists, to more complex societies. LeBlanc takes the reader on his own digs around the world -- from New Guinea to the Southwestern U.S. to Turkey -- to show how he has come to discover warfare everywhere at every time. His own fieldwork combined with his archaeological, ethnographic, and historical research, presents a riveting account of how, throughout human history, people always have outgrown the carrying capacity of their environment, which has led to war.

Ultimately, though, LeBlanc's point of view is reassuring and optimistic. As he explains the roots of warfare in human history, he also demonstrates that warfare today has far less impact than it did in the past. He also argues that, as awareness of these patterns and the advantages of modern technology increase, so does our ability to avoid war in the future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Jul 23, 2013
• ISBN: 9781466850194

Steven A. LeBlanc

Steven A. LeBlanc, an archaeologist at Harvard, is the director of collections at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. He is the author of Prehistoric Warfare in the American Southwest.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

FINDING WARFARE IN ALL THE WRONG PLACES

War today and in the last century seems unprecedented in intensity, ferocity, and the numbers of lives claimed. With this ominous cloud hanging over our heads, it’s easy to believe that humans have somehow abandoned the benign behavior that characterized our earliest history. What happened to those noble savages of old who were content to live in peace and harmony and were not out to colonize and exploit the undeveloped world? The ecological catastrophes occurring all around us present another modern maelstrom—and no ecosystem is immune, from the oceans to the tropical rain forest, from the pristine Arctic to the ozone layer. Humankind today seems to have abandoned a reverence for nature and lost long-held abilities to live in ecological balance. Has progress—that escalating desire to be bigger, better, faster, stronger—totally extinguished our ancestral instincts to grow everything we consume and hunt only what we need to sustain us? Many view the march of civilization not as a blessing but as a curse, bringing with it escalating warfare and spiraling environmental destruction unlike anything in our human past.

Contrary to exceedingly popular opinion, and as bad as our problems may be today, none of this is true. The common notion of humankind’s blissful past, populated with noble savages living in a pristine and peaceful world, is held by those who do not understand our past and who have failed to see the course of human history for what it is.

I am an archaeologist. I have spent my career attempting to make sense of the past, and I find a world completely at odds with popular misconceptions. Not only is the past I observe not peaceful and pristine, but, cruel and ugly as it may be, it provides great insight into the present. The warfare and ecological destruction we find today fit into patterns of human behavior that have gone on for millions of years. Humans have been destroying their environments for a long time and continue to do so for the same reasons they did in the past. Much of today’s warfare reads just like the warfare of tens of thousands of years ago—the same causes, the same tactics, and the same attitudes. Careful study of the past can provide us with a much more clear understanding of the causes of and reasons for modern warfare and ecological imbalance not evident simply by trying to make sense of the present without a context. As such, this proper grasp of the past has invaluable benefits for humankind today. We are far better off understanding the past than ignoring it, or believing a mythical version of history that bears little resemblance to what actually took place.

A myth, due to its very nature, is not grounded in any reality, so is susceptible to total manipulation. Though we can manipulate reality, it is subject to objective questioning, because we presume there is an objective basis to it. Once we accept a myth as truth without any consideration of its reality, how do we question its implications or manipulation on objective grounds? Myths are dangerous, and we are better off without them. My purpose here is to debunk some of the most prevalent myths my profession and the general public have about human history. My hope is that we can look objectively at these intensely emotional issues and their implications.

If I am right, then why have archaeologists and historians not been telling us of these truths? I believe it is not just the general public that misunderstands the past, but also most scholars who study it. While my purpose here is not to rail against my colleagues, it is impossible to ignore the fact that academia has missed what I consider to be some of the essence of human history. The past has been sanitized, and the recorders of history have often cast humans as having lived in ecological and peaceful bliss. This is simply not true, but why do I see what so many of my colleagues have missed? For one thing, the past is elusive and not always easy to observe.

I have undertaken archaeological fieldwork in many different locations on several continents, on sites from very different time periods. During the last thirty-odd years, I have worked on digs as a student, as a regular member of the crew, or as the director of multiyear projects. After all this time as an archaeologist, I have only recently come to realize that wherever I have dug, regardless of the time period or place, I have discovered evidence of warfare. I have excavated sites in the eastern United States, the Middle East, Peru, and two areas of the American Southwest, and each of these projects yielded evidence of warfare—once I bothered to look for it. These observations have been directly bolstered by visits to dozens of other ongoing excavations.

I never chose to join these projects or selected the sites to excavate with the purpose of finding warfare. The evidence just turned out to be there—or at least I think the evidence was there. Most of my archaeological colleagues don’t see warfare as often as I do. Some never see it anywhere, and others see it only occasionally—and usually not on the sites or time periods with which they are working. Other archaeologists see the evidence for warfare but dismiss it as not being of any real interest. Their attitude seems to be, Sure, there was some warfare in the past, but it was incidental and inconsequential, and had virtually no impact on human history. How do I square these attitudes and assessments of some very good archaeologists with my own observations? This prevalence of warfare—is it my perception, or is it reality?

Even though my theories have been met by a fair amount of scholarly resistance over the years (and that’s putting it nicely), I have been compelled to ponder the question, Just how common was warfare in the past? I have finally concluded that warfare was quite common in the past, and that my findings on three continents and within multiple time periods were not a fluke but the norm. This led me to reason that if conflict was common, then it must have been an important occurrence in the course of human history. In short, I decided that I wasn’t seeing things that did not exist; instead, my colleagues were ignoring things that did.

From this confluence of ideas came the realization that not only was I dealing with a major misunderstanding about human conflict in the past, but that there had been surprisingly little scholarly effort devoted to trying to understand why there was so much warfare throughout human history. Part of this may well be because these scholars simply don’t know how much warfare existed in the past, but it is also because they have chosen to ignore most of the warfare they do know about. As I began to work through these ideas, I realized that if we misunderstand the past, then we also misunderstand the present, because humans automatically compare the present with how we think things were in the past—be it the weather, taxes, or what constitutes a basic education. Yet misunderstandings between the past and the present can be dangerous. My hope is that this book—with its sometimes harsh and cruel implications—will clear up some of these misconceptions.

We are much better off understanding the reality concerning warfare and human ecology, and getting this right is very relevant to understanding how humans became humans and how we function as humans. A thorough comprehension of this history must in some way enable us to better understand ourselves today. Could warfare in the distant past have ever been worse than it has been the last century? At this very moment, we are destroying the rain forest, depleting the seas, and possibly changing the world’s climate. Does this mean we no longer know how to live in harmony with nature? The answer to both these questions is, not necessarily. Only history can tell us if we are getting more warlike or more peaceful, and whether we are becoming more or less ecologically in balance. And history provides a surprising answer.

Since the beginning of time, humans have been unable to live in ecological balance. No matter where we happen to live on Earth, we eventually outstrip the environment. This has always led to competition as a means of survival, and warfare has been the inevitable consequence of our ecological-demographic propensities. The question that remains is whether humans are genetically programmed to be this way. Or do we have the ability to change the fundamental human-environmental relationship that not only has been with us for millions of years but in many ways has made us who we are today? I hope to show that though our history has been far less peaceful and pleasant than most of us are comfortable hearing about, our past does not doom our future. We humans are doing better than we realize. This may come as cold comfort to a world filled with warfare and plagued by ecological disasters, but I believe that a careful reading of human history—our real and very long history—shows that the opportunity for positive change is great.

What I present here combines archaeology, ethnology, ecology, history, and primatology. All these disciplines require subtle and detailed analysis and interpretation, and by necessity I do not go into all the nuances and alternative interpretations they warrant. I hope the reader will appreciate not getting bogged down in such arguments, and I will suffer the criticisms of the experts.

I was hard-pressed to present these theories in both a historical and sociological framework that the general reader could follow. I decided to lay out a broad scheme of human history, using chimpanzees as an analogue for our very early human history. This analogue is imperfect but extremely revealing about our past. I then focus on the million-plus years that humans lived without farming—the majority of our history—under the social organizational concept of foragers. And finally, I break up the remaining era of human history—which began with agriculture—into three concepts: tribes, chiefdoms, and states. This formulation, which is hardly original and admittedly oversimplified, enables me to combine archaeological and ethnographic examples from around the world and provide some insights into how human ecology, human demography, and warfare have evolved in tandem. It also provides a means to bridge the past with today. As the reader will see, much of the modern world continues to live more like the tribes and chiefdoms of the past than contemporary city dwellers. And much of the warfare today is more like past tribe- and chiefdom-level warfare than the high-tech wars of the modern era.

I try throughout to provide enough archaeological and ethnographic detail to allow a real feeling for these ancient societies to come through. In the span of about a century and a half, modern scholars have learned a great deal about the human past, a surprising amount, given how hard it can be to figure some of this stuff out. I believe that learning about our long and exceedingly complicated human past satisfies far more than just idle curiosity, and I hope I have been able to apply to today’s world the knowledge of the ancient world that only the earth can reveal.

STEVEN A. LEBLANC

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS

AUGUST 2002

chapter one

WARFARE AND ECOLOGY: MYTH AND REALITY

New Mexico’s El Morro Valley, like the entire American Southwest, is one fantastic archaeology lab. The dry climate of Arizona, New Mexico, and the southern parts of Utah and Colorado leads to unusually good preservation, allowing archaeologists to trace the path of early humans in the region back thousands of years. El Morro, situated at an altitude of seven thousand feet along the Continental Divide, is a vast, semiarid series of sandy plains broken up by huge rocky outcrops, called mesas, that periodically erupt out of the landscape and dominate the horizon. Today, this is Zuni country, but in the ancient past it was home to the Anasazi ancestors of such present-day pueblo people as the Hopi, Zuni, and Acoma.

Some of the largest Anasazi archaeological sites in the Southwest are located on top of El Morro’s mesas. Ponderosa pines now cover the slopes and sagebrush dots the valley bottoms but, as the archaeology shows, corn, beans, and squash once grew on the valley floor. Life as a farmer would have been possible in El Morro in the past, but precarious. Winters were (and are) cold; an early frost or a heavy summer hailstorm could destroy an entire year’s crops. When the Anasazi lived in the valley, it may have been a bit more hospitable, but today no one could survive as a corn farmer there.

In the early 1970s, my colleagues and I began doing archaeological fieldwork in the El Morro Valley and discovered seven very large prehistoric pueblos, all dating from around A.D. 1275 to 1325 and housing upward of one thousand people each. Two of these communities were located on mesa tops that were not easy to reach. Surrounded by two-story-high unbroken outer walls, the villages were perched on steep-sided mesas. Both the way the villages were laid out and where they were located suggested that military defense most certainly was an aspect of their construction. This defensive posture was impossible to miss—they could have seen an enemy coming from miles away. Even a sneak attack would have been almost impossible on a village situated four hundred feet up on an isolated outcrop. Other communities we uncovered within the valley were fortresslike constructions with equally high outer walls.

That warfare, or some sort of intergroup conflict, was a possibility among the Anasazi that we mentioned in our National Science Foundation grant proposal, but it was neither of much interest to myself or my colleagues nor was it deemed important by academia at that time. NSF had given us funding to figure out what these seven-hundred-year-old communities farmed and hunted, the impact of climate change, and the nature of their social systems—not to look for warfare.

Within a few days of beginning our fieldwork, we discovered a site that was burned to the ground and from which the people had clearly fled for their lives. Pottery and valuables were left in place on the floors, and bushels of corn still lay in the storerooms. As our research progressed through that summer, we eventually determined that this site was burned and abandoned, and that immediately afterward a large, much more defensive site was built in its place nearby. The building stones had been removed from the earlier site and used rapidly to construct its replacement. The earlier site comprised individual, single-story houses somewhat spread out around the area. The replacement site consisted of apartmentlike rooms with adjoining walls that formed a solid rectangle one hundred yards across with unbroken outer walls two stories high—in other words, a fortress. The evidence indicated that something catastrophic had occurred at this ancient Anasazi settlement, and that the survivors had almost immediately, and at great speed, set about to prevent it from happening again.

As we continued our fieldwork, the role warfare played in the lives of El Morro’s early inhabitants slowly percolated into our awareness. Several other villages we excavated also had abandoned their nondefensible houses and built forts, including the ones on the mesa tops. We began to consider how the inhabitants of one village may have attacked another village. One group, which had built its community against a cliff for protection, had cut a hole through the cliff wall in order to see potential attackers coming. Our research team still continued to think along the traditional anthropological ideologies of the day: that the explanations for the really significant events in the valley would be found in the form of new social organizations, or in the effects of drought or other climate changes.

Thirty years ago, we archaeologists thought warfare may have existed, but we considered it almost irrelevant—and certainly not central—to our understanding of past events and people. Today, scholars are coming to realize that the evidence my colleagues and I uncovered in the El Morro Valley was part of a process that led to warfare throughout the entire Southwest, with attendant massacres, population decline, and areal abandonments that forever changed the way of life in the region.¹

It took more than twenty-five years, and a great deal of additional fieldwork and library research, for me finally to change my initial naive view of the past and of humans in general. My take on warfare is now very different from what it was. Though these new ideas about conflict seem exceedingly obvious to me, I arrived at these conclusions not by means of abstract theory, but by being forced to look at warfare based on conclusive evidence I found in the ground. The central importance of warfare throughout human history came to me slowly, prompted by archaeological fieldwork in a number of different regions and reinforced as I tried to reconcile theoretical positions that became increasingly impossible to accept.

Why couldn’t I—or any of my colleagues—see the magnitude and the implications of the warfare that was displayed before our eyes at El Morro? We were simply not conditioned to see it. The idea that all was peaceful long before writing in the ancient past was, and is, how most archaeologists and anthropologists see the world. The prevailing scholarly view is that warfare was of little social consequence in the past and is relatively unimportant in understanding the human condition. Though in the last three decades more archaeologists are prepared to see warfare for what it is, there continues to be an institutional reluctance within anthropology and archaeology to ignore or discount evidence for conflict among past societies. And that reluctance goes back to the eighteenth century.

Academics are not the only ones with these views. For a variety of reasons, almost everybody seems to be preoccupied with the idea that all was peaceful in the hundreds of millennia of the human past.

Why don’t all archaeologists see the clear evidence for warfare? When I ask archaeologists if they think warfare occurred in the prehistoric past, they always say, Yes. When I ask if it was a major component of the lives of the people they are studying, they almost always say, No. The reluctance among archaeologists to see warfare occurs because they have an important human trait: empathy. If you spend years in the desert in a dig camp where, even with all our modern technology, keeping the camp functioning is a major effort, you cannot help being impressed with the ingenuity, skills, and determination of the ancient people you are studying. Hacking your way through the jungle to reach the remains of a great city with beautiful murals and inscribed stela leaves you with a sense of awe and amazement of the accomplishments of these long-gone people. They become your people. As the archaeologists begin to understand those ancients, they become attached to them. My People could not have had warfare. The reluctance to see warfare for what it is also derives being politically correctness. Archaeologists and ethnologists have an audience. The audience wants to hear about peace and not about warfare. When most archaeologists find evidence for warfare, their people must have been defending themselves against some nasty people from somewhere else. Defensive warfare yes, never offensive warfare. This natural and admirable human propensity to see the achievements of the peoples whose history archaeologists recover results in a false and incomplete history and a major misunderstanding of our past.

A very recent example of this reluctance to accept evidence of past conflict can be found with Ötzi, the Ice Man. In 1991, hikers in the Alps came across the frozen body of a man more than five thousand years old. Nicknamed Ötzi, this individual caught the fancy of the world, most especially Europeans, and his miraculously preserved tools and clothes—even the contents of his stomach—were subject to intense scrutiny by scientists. Ötzi carried a variety of items with him, including a bow, a quiver of arrows, a stone dagger or knife and, most unexpectedly, a hatchet with a copper blade. Prior to this find, scholars had thought such copper tools had not been used in this part of Europe until many hundreds of years later. Among anthropologists, much speculation was given to how Ötzi had died. The most popular explanation was that he was a shepherd and had fallen asleep and frozen to death in a snowstorm. Another possibility put forth was that Ötzi was a trader and was crossing the Alps on business, so to speak. Either way, a sad but peaceful scenario for his death was assumed by scholars and was broadly accepted.

Little was made of such details as the fact that the hatchet Ötzi carried lacked wear marks, indicating that it had never been used to chop a tree, and that the copper from which it was fashioned was probably too soft for chopping. Everything changed in the summer of 2001, when new X rays revealed that Ötzi had a fatal arrowhead still in his chest. According to the Ötzi Web site, the earlier explanations for the Ice Man’s demise were wrong.

It seems obvious to me that Ötzi had been shot in the back and died from warfare, like many of his contemporaries in the late Neolithic period of Europe. His hatchet was most likely a battleaxe, and he was armed to the teeth. It needn’t take an arrowhead embedded in bone to suggest the obvious. For one thing, anthropologists and historians know that the battleaxe was a preferred weapon for hand-to-hand combat in Europe from 6000 B.C. to A.D. 1000. In fact, many of Europe’s social groups—the Franks, Saxons, and Lombards, for example—were named after the distinctive close-combat weapons they traditionally carried.

In spite of a growing willingness among many anthropologists in recent years to accept the idea that the past was not peaceful, a lingering desire to sanitize and ignore warfare still exists within the field. Naturally, the public absorbs this scholarly bias, and the myth of a peaceful past continues. If one analyzes popular culture, such views seem to dominate our outlook of the past. For example, it was the cowboys who decimated the Indians. (True, but the Indians fought fiercely among themselves long before the encroaching Euro-Americans arrived.) Or it was the white man, including North African traders, who terrorized the native Africans. (This is also true, but the Africans, too, had previously warred for millennia.) The Chinese desire for exotic woods and spices from the tropics changed traditional relationships among the people of Southeast Asia, leading to intense conflict in places like the Philippines. (Yes, but the region was far from peaceful in earlier times.)

Just how pervasive is this idea that peace prevailed in the past, or that scholars ignore the warfare before their eyes? Think about some of the most cherished and popular wonders of the world. Such famous tourist attractions as China’s magnificent Great Wall or Greece’s beautiful Acropolis are actually evidence of warfare.² China’s wall was obviously constructed for defense, but consider the frequency and intensity of the warfare threatened by Mongol and Manchu horsemen to have compelled the Chinese to devote so much human labor and sacrifice to create a fifteen-hundred-mile-long wall of such massive proportions. The Acropolis was originally occupied as a walled Mycenaean fortress town. Only many hundreds of years later did it became a temple area. The view is certainly fine and the breezes delightfully cool at the top of that steep hill, but again, constructing a fortified town with walls built of massive multi-ton stone blocks at the top of such a promontory was no mean feat—nor was it an easy or convenient place to live. What tourist comes away from the Acropolis with the idea that in fact, the Mycenaeans (the pre–Classic Greek contemporaries of fabled Troy) fortified almost all their palace towns, and warfare was, in reality, as commonplace and intense as the Iliad portrays?

Even more evidence of warfare is found among the paintings at Lascaux and other caves in France and Spain.³ These earliest known human artworks feature magnificent renditions of bison, mammoth, and deer but also include sticklike human figures with spears projecting into their bodies. Somehow, descriptions of these less-than-harmonious sides of the world’s wonders don’t often make it into the travel brochures. There is a failure to look for or see evidence of warfare because of a myth and the preoccupation with the idea that the past was peaceful.

This photo of the Dani people of Highland New Guinea, taken in the early 1960s, shows what seems to be a chaotic melee characteristic of tribal farmer warfare, and even a minor rain shower can cause this warfare to cease for a day. This has led many to not consider this to be true war, yet the proportional death rate exceeded that of either World War.

In its simplest form, this misconception portrays humans as peaceful by nature and considers them to have been so for millions of years. This notion assumes that for much of human history people lived in nonviolent societies and maintained pleasant, helpful, symbiotic relationships with their neighbors. While there surely were bellicose periods, war was not the norm or a constant threat. Popular belief also holds that only after the development of civilization, or highly complex societies, did things begin to change. The common assumption is that only when these increasingly more complex societies spread, and in particular when European civilization came to dominate much of the world through colonizing, was warfare introduced (and induced) to the far corners of Earth. This is the impression one comes away with when reading many books on how we became human and who wound up where on Earth. Such an impression misses the essence of human history.

Most people today would admit that, of course, there was some conflict in the past, but the presumption is that it was occasional. Many still believe that only if the impact of civilization is minimal or nonexistent can examples of the peaceful life way that had existed for millennia be found. Warfare in popular culture and much of academia is perceived as a plague spreading and infecting innocent, primitive peoples who had previously been spared the scourge of intergroup conflict.

Even when this myth of a peaceful past can be overwhelmingly dispelled, as it can be for recent prehistory (that is, the last ten thousand years or so), popular assumption remains that things were generally peaceful during the previous several million years. The discovery by Jane Goodall and her coworkers that our closest relatives, the chimpanzees, are not peaceful came as a surprise to most scholars, rather than a predictable expectation.

Now, it’s one thing for me to claim that warfare was heavily represented in the sites and places in which I have done fieldwork, but just because I have seen warfare in my own work does not automatically mean it was common everywhere. If a peaceful past is a myth, warfare should be in evidence in almost all times and places. Obtaining a clear picture of the real prevalence of early warfare often requires intense research because of the confounding effect of European impact on traditional societies before they were well studied. The sciences of anthropology and archaeology rely on three main evidentiary sources. The archaeological record includes artifacts, architectural plans, and environmental information, such as ancient pollen or animal bones from meals, derived from digging. Or it can simply be a matter of locating the prehistoric sites where people lived and studying the patterns of these sites over the landscape.

Anthropologists look for evidence by using information found in historical documents, including written accounts by early explorers or visitors to a particular region. Or they turn to the accounts of ethnographers, professionals, usually anthropologists, who study a community or culture by living among them for a period of time. Generally, archaeological evidence is all scholars have from ancient people who left no written records; thus they are prehistoric. Of course, such people had oral histories (that is, histories that are usually not available to us), and some even had writing, for example the Indus Valley civilization, which is still lost because the writing is not yet deciphered.

Looking for evidence of early warfare usually focuses on the archaeological record and the very first written accounts of societies. These early accounts almost always show evidence of warfare, even when anthropologists often a hundred or more years later found peace. When there is a good archaeological picture of any society on Earth, there is almost always also evidence of warfare. It does not seem to matter whether people live on islands: The small islands of Micronesia, such as Palau, are covered with forts. Or lived in harsh climates: Both the Australian Aborigines of the desert and the Eskimo of the Arctic had lots of war. Or the lush climate of Hawaii, where warfare was endemic from soon after it was settled. Some of this conclusion has been summarized by Lawrence Keeley, author of War Before Civilization, who makes this very point.

Keeley’s most telling observation is that in many traditional societies from which such information could be obtained by ethnographers—the people of highland New Guinea or the Yanomama of the Venezuelan rain forest, for example—25 percent of adult males died from warfare well into the middle of the twentieth century. Such a high fatality rate from warfare is found archaeologically as well, although it is harder to get similar estimates. I have visited excavations in the presumed peaceful Southwest where men had been scalped, the heads of enemies taken as trophies, and entire villages massacred with the bodies left unburied. Twenty-five percent of deaths due to warfare may be a conservative estimate. Prehistoric warfare was common and deadly, and no time span or geographical region seems to have been immune.

We need to recognize and accept the idea of a nonpeaceful past for the entire time of human existence. Though there were certainly times and places during which peace prevailed, overall, such interludes seem to have been short-lived and infrequent. People in the past were in conflict and competition most of the time. Which groups prevailed and survived, and how people interacted with their neighbors, had great impact on the way we humans organized our societies, how we spread over Earth, and why people settled where they did. Today in parts of the world, things are much the same—war is a constant and critical part of their lives. These wars are not an aberration, but a continuation of behavior stretching back deep into the past. To understand much of today’s war, we must see it as a common and almost universal human behavior that has been with us as we went from ape to